Munro (Immortals After Dark #18) by Kresley Cole

            “Always, bràthair. But if we work together, we can make it through this.”

            Munro shook his head. “I have doubts. I canna see an end to this nightmare.”

            “Once we slay the first one, the next will go down easier.”

            Munro turned the crib-assembly directions upside down, then right side up. “Now they’re just fucking with us.”

            Kereny’s raucous babies shower had netted them tons of supplies to fill the newly decorated nursery in the lodge. Among them, they’d received two car seats and a pair of cribs; the former needed installation and the latter assembly.

            Parts littered the floor. Will said, “Mayhap we should no’ have used our claws in the beginning?”

            “Aye. But failure is no’ an option here tonight.” The laddies were arriving in just fourteen days.

            Munro had worked out the logistics for Kereny’s labor—the operating room was set up to the doc’s specs, and Deshazior was on call—but the cribs . . . “I need to have all of this stuff done before she wakes.” Kereny required ever more rest and would sleep like a hibernating bear.

            As another young immortal, Chloe too slept more than Will. So Munro and his twin had spent a lot of time together talking—as they hadn’t since tragedy had marked their young lives.

            Over these past months, Munro had grown much more at ease with his twin. Will, in turn, was growing more at ease with everything.

            “How about this?” Will connected one random piece of the crib to another, and the match looked promising.

            “It’s a start.”

            As they worked, Will asked, “Any ideas about names?”

            “Nay. Lady’s choice on that. She said she’d know when she saw the babes together.”

            Will grinned. “I still canna believe you’re having twin lads. Remember that time you and I let the herd of sheep into the house?”

            “Aye. Mam told us she wished twin boys on us. And here we are.”

            Over all these ages, Munro and Will had rarely spoken of their mother. The subject had only dredged up pain in his twin, so neither brother ever brought her up. This must be another sign that Will had come to terms with the past.

            “If I’m this excited about my nephews”—Will slapped Munro on the back—“you should be over the moon.”

            I’m trying to be. I want to be. “I’ll be more excited once Jels is defeated.”

            After Munro and Will’s first frustrating skirmish with the archwarlock, they’d continued to get leads on his whereabouts. Diligence demanded that the brothers track down each one. Yet Munro got the sense that Jels was testing them or keeping them busy while he planned something bigger.

            Kereny had hatched a plan of her own for the archwarlock, one so crazy that Munro had wanted to implement it immediately. . . .

            But maybe their luck would hold, and everything would remain quiet until after the babes were born. Hell, stranger things had happened in the Lore. He told Will, “In the meantime, I’ll feel better once we get this surgery behind us.”

            Kereny was confident in their c-section plan. And as she grew more comfortable with her pregnancy, this time, and her new species, she struck him as not only powerful, but bloody dazzling. She was blooming.

            Munro? Not so much. His dread was serrated, dipping and peaking, but it always had the bite of a blade.

            That fear was a breath away from resentment. Did he want his sons? Aye, of course. But he needed her.

            Though Kereny had been training rigorously to control her beast, the threat of the fork in the road loomed. He knew one thing for certain: his fate was tied to hers. If she became lost to her beast, so too would Munro to his. Where your mate goes, you follow. . . .

            “What’s on your mind?” Will must’ve read his pensive expression.

            Might as well get this over with. “If anything should happen to me and Kereny—”

            “Wheesht, Munro. No talking like that.”